Field
Aspects of the present invention generally relate to an information processing apparatus that performs near field radio communication.
Description of the Related Art
Portable terminals such as smartphones or tablet personal computers (PC) include a wireless communication function. One of the uses of such a wireless communication function, for example, is to transmit a picture or an electronic document stored in the portable terminal to a printer using wireless communication and cause the printer to print out the picture or electronic document.
To cause a portable terminal to perform wireless communication with an external apparatus, such as a printer, the portable terminal needs to connect to an access point to establish wireless communication. As a method for establishing wireless communication, a handover using near field communication (NFC) has been known (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2013-157736). A handover refers to a method for obtaining connection information needed to perform wireless communication (for example, a service set identifier (SSID) of the access point) by using near field radio communication such as NFC, and establishing wireless communication based on the obtained connection information. For the user, the handover enables wireless communication between the portable terminal and the external apparatus by simply bringing the portable terminal close to the external apparatus or by simply touching the external apparatus with the portable terminal.
If NFC is used to perform a handover, the external apparatus stores connection information in its NFC tag. A conventional NFC tag stores a single piece of connection information. The portable terminal obtains the connection information from the NFC tag and performs the handover. Depending on the use environment of the user of the portable terminal, a plurality of pieces of connection information needs to be stored instead of a single piece of connection information. For example, in an office environment, a plurality of access points may be provided. There is therefore a need to store the SSIDs of each of the plurality of access points in an NFC tag. However, in conventional portable terminals, it is not assumed that a plurality of pieces of connection information is obtained by NFC, and appropriate processing cannot be performed if a plurality of pieces of connection information is obtained by NFC.